Chris, and any other Sun folks floating about I wanted to determine what was the best way to get in touch with people in your marketing groups (or even to get in touch via phone with you directly) to discuss potential co-marketing opportunities with you folks. Please send me an email at gregorypierce@yahoo.com or me.remove.this@gregorypierce.com.

Chris, and any other Sun folks floating about I wanted to determine what was the best way to get in touch with people in your marketing groups (or even to get in touch via phone with you directly) to discuss potential co-marketing opportunities with you folks. Please send me an email at gregorypierce@yahoo.com or me.remove.this@gregorypierce.com.

If you do not get the answer right away it usually means it got buried withint the many layers at SUN.. you need the more direct approach by finding the actual person or team of poeple that handle this at SUN..

OK, I'm not going to do that but I can say that in general Sun is not going to be interested in co-marketing games. We (the Games Technologies Group at Sun) are always looking for cutting edge stuff done in Java that we can use during presentations, however.

But it's a strange dichotomy! Because largely, their thing is free! Hm.

Which reminds me - I'd be happy to give them 20 cents with every copy my game sold if they'd let me fiddle with the VM installation. A few hundred developers, a few hundred thousand games, and that'd be a nice little earner.

Sun is not interested in games. They abuse the games community to show how cool Java is. They want to sell their thing, not ours.

Herk, I am actually a bit troubled that you see Sun's position this way. I do not, for a second, believe that we *abuse* the games industry in ANY way. Our stance for not co-marekting is simple: we do not want to compete with our game development partners. Certianly, if we wanted to, we have the resources to build a channel of content and thereby, potentially shut some developers out.

What you saw at JavaOne is the start of Sun's committment to the games industry. So, let's see. By abuse you mean:

1) Funding a team to develop game related technologies.2) Funding the development of technologies that we are releasing to the open source community on our dime.3) We actually WANT to help YOU sell your items. This is the whole reason for Java.Com. Go there and check it out. We don't make any money redirecting visitors to content, but the parthers that are showcased are making additional revenue. Again, on our dime.4) Java.Net and all of the resources there are for the furthering of the community.

I thought the opportunity for you to present there gave you a bit of exposure, as well as the link on Java.net (you took the site down? ) driving more traffic to your site was good! Not to mention the free admission to the entire JavaOne conference, which I had to fight for. (BTW, you all may or may not know this but Sun Microsystems does not *actually* own the JavaOne conference. We have to buy tickets for our employees as well.)

As a person who has put over 3 years of my life in getting Sun Microsystems to recognize this community, and has succeeded, I am dissapointed that you feel this was an abuse of game developers work.

It is true that we are also looking to generate revenue from this industry, as are all of you. I do not, however, feel that we have been in ANY way abusive of anyone in this community. Please show me where we have.

Can you give insights on how you and your team will be helping to do this so-called "co-marketing" thing? I mean, aside from java.net, which is meant for developers, and java.com, which to me seems to be a promotional site for Java itself, are there any thoughts or plans on how the Game Technology Group will help promote both itself (important) and the people who use Java to write games (more important to us, less to you)?

Perhaps I missed something important about Java.com. Is there a way a game developer can get his/her work showcased there? I didn't seem to see such.... oh, and same with my private comment regarding the affiliates list on the community home page to you.

I hope you don't mind - this isn't meant to sound offensive. Just trying to understand Sun's direction is all.

are there any thoughts or plans on how the Game Technology Group will help promote both itself (important) and the people who use Java to write games (more important to us, less to you)?

I've also been wondering about this and I am a bit confused about the direction that Sun's marketing has taken lately.

Creating a separate division for game technology was a good way to enter a new market segment, like General Motors creating the Cadillac division. However, changing Javagaming to "Java Games - A Java.net community" seems a bit like GM killing off their Cadillac brand and calling the cars "Luxury cars by General Motors". If the name should change at all, it should be to something less generic!

Since Sun is known mainly for other things than game technology, having a separate identity for its game technology avoids both diluting Sun's server focus and having its server focus stand in the way of its marketing efforts for game technology. Jeff once asked why people assumed Sun didn't know graphics even though the company is in the OpenGL ARB, the answer is probably that Sun is too famous for other things. People would probably have an easier time assuming that the Javagaming division knows more about graphics though...

The question is, will Chris get to keep a separate identity through his Javagaming brand as he got his own division, or will the gaming effort be hidden away under the java.net umbrella?

I have to agree - the Javagaming brand is quite surprisingly strong, albeit underground. You wouldn't want Toyota scribbled all over your Lexus now would you?

I think Herk is touching on the symbiosis of the relationship Sun has with developers. We get plenty of publicity from Sun by them showing off our game - and Sun get plenty of publicity showing off how neat Java is. It's not a quantifiable exchange, it's a qualifiable one - a bit of mutual backscratching. I had a surprising number of people asking me how much Sun were paying me to showcase Alien Flux, without realising the truth of the matter - we've exactly equally benefitted from the exposure.

The Java.Net is an umbrella of *community* sites, not a Sun product site. The goal of Java.Net is to continue to develop Java technologies in the community and we will continue to support and push that community. Java.Net will become THE landing point for all opensource community Java development efforts on the web.

By including the games stuff in the Java.net community, we broaden the exposure to other developers who may be working on components that actually have relevance for game developers (i.e. communication software, chat systems, delivery, etc.), may be on the fence about becoming game developers, etc. Without the overall community tie-in, those developers might never have discovered JavaGaming.org!

We believe that this community will actually become stronger due to the increased exposure that we will have across these various communities.

I know that sometimes it has taken longer than we would have liked, but I believe that the team at Sun has delivered on everything we have promised this community (and BOY has it been difficult ). We feel better than ever before when we look at the future of Java, Sun and video games.

What we wind up delivering to the games industry, as Sun product, will have it's own branding that is separate from the community. When Sun finally delivers to the market the solutions we are focused on internally, we will change the industry and Java technology will be the cornerstone of that change.

To quote (somewhat) the Merovingian, "Mark my words and mark them well" we are just getting started, so hang on

Ok, so here we go. I know that sometimes it has taken longer than we would have liked, but I believe that the team at Sun has delivered on everything we have promised this community (and BOY has it been difficult ).

That's a bit what I am afraid of.

Sun created a OGL/OAL binding w/o consulting those parts of the community who did before. Thereby making the LWJGL effort pointless. (At least sort of, no details here, please. It WILL harm LWJGLs recognition and distribution).

Doug talked about development of infrastructure things. This makes me feel insecure wether it makes sense to continue working on my HeadQuarter stuff. Sun will be able make that void again. Doug is far better than me, and if he works fulltime .... JavaOne2004 - and I can throw away my beloved code?

Basically, JOGL/JOAL/JINPUT is a good thing. But for Sun is doing that in secret labs and come up with the result all of a sudden, this might discourage people from the gaming community who care for technology.

I absolutely 100% agree with Herkules on this one.If this is a *community* effort, why wasn't the community involved? Why create a commercially funded project for the community, (somewhat) invalidating current community efforts?

Um...the code we released is opensource and therefore is seeking input from the community. You don't have to use the APIs, it's up to you. The case could be made for why the community didn't get behind Java3D, join the JCP and make it better. It went off and did LWJGL, which is cool, but the argument can be made both ways. Also, due to the way LWJGL was developed it could not pass the paramaters that the JCP requires to become a "Java"standard. Jogl does and can therefore become part of the core APIs.

As for infrastructure, well, we *ARE* a systems company after all but what we are building may not even compete with other efforts in this community. We are thinking about areas that are not being addressed today. You stand to have more competition with what is in the market today than from what we are building.

Up to know, LWJGL was exposing direct pointers everywhere. Do you really expect something like this to be even considered as a part of 'official' API ? It had no support for AWT - by purpose. Only single window is supported.

LWJGL does what it does very well - allows to write high-performance, single-window/fullscreen games. But it cannot be used for anything else. This disqualifies it from very start. Exposing raw pointers is just adding insult to injury as far as 'official' status is concered.

As for Sun 'fixing' LWJGL - probably it could be done. But what is left from LWJGL if you take off it main idea (being able to run games without AWT) - instead of LWJGL you are left with JGL. It is not longer original project and I doubt if Sun and Cas could agree on what is needed and what is 'overhead' - two versions would fork very soon. I think that Sun has done a lot better with starting their own binding that taking LWJGL and changing it beyond recognision.

To SpaceGhost:

Have you ever tried to join JSR expert group as independent developer ? I doubt. I had and it is quite hard. And I had arguments (for other JSR) a better than just 'I think that java3d is cool, I have written one loader, no, I have not used any other scenegraph, no I'm not in ARB group, no I'm not hardware vendor, no I'm not....'.

It would be different if early stages of JCP would be open - some kind of public mailing list (could be moderated), where people interested could exchange ideas with expert group. But JCP is not open as far as induhviduals are concerned, so it is not an argument.

We have done as much as possible - we have bugged developers on java3d-interest and here for any news concering 1.4, telling things which would be needed there etc. But there was almost no response - in fact, only few weeks ago we have learned that java3d is in 'holding pattern'. But how could we help, if java3d source is one of most closely guarded secrets under a Sun

Just to let you know - I'm happy with both JOGL and LWJGL. They fill different niches. There is no point in fighting for 'mind shares'. If person wants to have opengl window embedded inside swing app, he will take JOGL. If he wants to sell small, self-contained game not using AWT, he will buy jet and use LWJGL.

LWJGL should drop nicely into a J2ME profile... which we almost certainly won't be allowed to specify because of the JCP barrier - although I'm working on something, fingers crossed. The reason LWJGL exists is because of the JCP barrier. Come to think of it, that's why JOGL exists too.

Raw pointers never hurt anyone by the way - it's a bit of a red herring. They're ints and you still can arbitrarily use them to do C style daftness. No-one's got anything against ints now, have they?

abies:The post was made in a provocative tone of voice, simply because of SG's statement thats said the community should have helped out on the J3D situatíon, instead of doing their own binding, which Sun then does anyway!?

I am 100% aware of the goal that LWJGL & JOGL et al. are trying to solve - they are similar, yet different on several important points. I am not saying that they should have used LWJGL as base, but they could have talked to us... Not a word, not a blib.

As for Sun & Community going hand in hand, why was LWJGL not told about this? Why wasn't Herkules (jxinput)? Did they contact the author of GL4java ? and so forth...

Abies, an important part you seem to forget, is that LWJGL is more than just a OGL binding. Take the OAL binding, they could *easily* taken ours and used it (and they do in some parts), yet they still write their own version. It just doesn't make sense!

Though I haven't looked through the jinput stuff, it seems *very* similar to jxinput (though jxinput actually seems better) - I am sure that Herkules wouldn't have mind deriviative work on jxinput - but he too (afaik) was only told about the project when the code was "dumped" in a repository - not very communicative of them...

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